Hipsters Can’t Save Music

It’s really interesting that while the sales of CDs and downloads are diving, the sales of vinyl records are on a pretty stable climb. Amazon has reported that over the last five years, vinyl sales have increased sevenfold (745% to be exact). Though I would have to warn you about the optimism about this number, as vinyl is still very niche and represents only 2% of the overall market.

I’ll admit that I quite enjoy listening to my vinyl collection and I’m guilty, myself, of ordering a few pressings of my favorite groups’ records on the high-fidelity polycarbon based medium, but I have no illusion in my mind that I’m doing it to prop up a dying business model.

The future is here right now and it doesn’t require a physical media, it’s all available with persistent data connections and cloud storage. Heck, I could be wrong about that as the entire world starts to flock to streaming music programs. Maybe we can set up a vinyl streaming service?

I sit upon my throne as the owner/shogun of this site, WatchPlayRead. But it wasn't always so. I too have had blogspots, I've done other community blogs, I've even written professionally for other sites out there...yet none of them provided the content I had a real passion for.
It is then that I became tired of being a small cog in a big machine, and of writing about nothing but game news after game news article and the periphery that comes from such schlock, like knowing who Michael Pachter and Bobby Kotick are.
I decided to start MediaWhoreNetwork.com and ran up my post count there for about 2 years, commenting about any and everything that I wanted to. I even started a weekly podcast that I feel has come into its own.
It wasn't until earlier this year that I realized that having the word "whore" in your URL might be a bit limiting to my potential audience. I then made the website and its branding move over to WatchPlayRead.com.

Leave us a Comment

“Maybe we can set up a vinyl streaming service?” I will cut you. But seriously, for a while there was an online movie streaming site that got around streaming licensing restrictions by actually streaming a live, playing in a DVD player copy of a film over the internet. Which meant that they could only stream to as many people as they had physical copies of the movie. Obviously this was an idea that was inherently broken (for one it doesn’t scale well, your costs and profits are entirely linear).

My charmingly useless anecdotes aside, I think there will always be a market for physical media, even in this world that is increasingly being overtaken by digital local and cloud media. The slowing momentum of ebook sales last year (while book sales overall actually increased), or, as you mentioned, the growth of vinyl record sales while CD sales decline, I think may actually point towards evidence of a group of people whose strong desire for the physical outweighs the convenience of the digital. Indeed, there’s no good argument for the increase in record sales beyond that fact, given that music now is entirely recorded and mastered digitally. Owning an analogue pressing of something that started it’s life as a digital file is pretty damned inefficient, and is ultimately going to actually be of a lower fidelity than just buying the CD (or another lossless digital format).

The ways in which we are able to purchase and consume media will undoubtedly continue to change and evolve, and physical copies may very well become an increasingly niche market, but I suspect it will never truly go away all together.

Yeah I completely agree, it’s the same reason that I play on my classic consoles over playing ROMs of the games I own, there’s something more visceral about touching that part of my history and experiencing it like I was the age when I first played it.

I’m guessing with vinyl (I too am a vinyl owner) it’s more of a you can literally see the music, touch the music, and interact with it on a level you can’t with CDs.